Friday, 17 May 2024

The public blame influencer for losing her indoor/outdoor Bengal cat to thieves

The public blame influencer for losing her indoor/outdoor Bengal cat to thieves
Olivia and Haukie who was stolen as he was let outside unsupervised. Image: Olivia's Instagram account.

This Aussie, female influencer, now realises that owning a Bengal cat presents a difficult problem of caregiving: should I keep my athletic, energetic and intelligent cat inside the home all the time or let him out through a cat flap?

I have hinted at the problem. The wild cat hybrids like the Bengal, even down to the F5s, are sharp mentally and demanding physically. They need exercise and entertaining.

Can you as an owner create an indoor environment which mentally stimulates a Bengal cat? The answer is that you have to. No choice as you can't let Bengal cats outside free to roam as they please because they are too pretty. 

They are liable to be stolen which is what happened this Aussie influencer whose name is Olivia Mathers.

She let her male Bengal, Haukie go outside unsupervised and he was stolen. She thinks she knows who stole Haukie and she thinks the cat has been sold to a new owner and taken to Brisbane from her home on the Gold Coast, QLD.

As she is an Instagram influencer she used the platform to try and recover Haukie. She told her 760,000 followers what happened. Some were sympathetic while others brutally criticised her for letting Haukie out unsupervised.


This is the problem; she was probably concerned about ensuring Haukie was happy and mentally stimulated so decided to let him out but you can't do it with a Bengal cat particularly with a Bengal cat living in Australia where a substantial percentage of citizens genuinely believe that cats must be confined to the home to protect wild life because they've be told this over and over again by the authorities who are having kittens over losing native mammals and marsupials to the skilled predation of Aussie's overgrown feral cats which have begun to look like another cat species endemic to Australia, the country were there were and are no native cat species.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Thursday, 16 May 2024

Accident or assault? Metal bottle hits Novak Djokovic.


The man leans over the barrier with his left hand offered to Novak. His backpack is wide open and his metal water bottle is in it - at the top. Was this an accident or a very carefully orchestrated surreptitious assault on Novak? Was it an assault made to look like an accident? You decide. Novak has a lot of detractors. He is unpopular with a lot of people.

Being of a suspicious mind and having watched the video several times, I am beginning to believe and allege that this man did it deliberately and that it was not an accident.
  • Why the metal bottle and not the usual plastic?
  • Why did it fall from the backpack so easily?
  • Why wasn't he shocked? Look at his reaction. Passive.
Here is another version:



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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

NONSENSE citrus peel hack to deter cats from your garden

Citrus peel hack to deter cats from your garden is nonsense
The hack the news media says deters cats - lemon peel scattered around flower beds. Image: MikeB



I've seen this a lot. News media websites restating what they say is the greatest domestic cat deterrent for your garden and it only costs 30p in the local supermarket. They say that citrus peel i.e. lemon and orange scattered around the flower beds is the best deterrent because cats hate the smell of citrus peel.

Immediately I can think of two things wrong with this suggestion which make it less than wonderful and probably ineffective after an hour if it was effective in the first place.

Lemon peel dries out in the sun quickly, perhaps in about one hour. It will lose a lot (almost all, I'd argue) of its smell after about an hour or so and it will no longer become a deterrent if it was originally. Do we expect the gardener to race around to pick it all up and re-scatter a fresh load every hour on the hour? Nah! 😢😃

Secondly, a person who is concerned about a domestic cat coming into their garden and onto their flowerbeds is going to be someone who is a good and concerned gardener as well. 

They're going to want to protect their flowerbeds because they are beautiful. And because they've put a lot of effort into them. 

It's impractical to suggest that this person, so proud of the appearance of their flowers, will find it acceptable to scatter piles of lemon peel in between the plants. It's going to look ridiculous and unattractive.

The cure is worse than the initial problem and in any case it isn't a cure. After many years of writing articles about domestic cats including deterrents because it's one of those pet topics that the news media bring up from time to time (excuse the pun), I can say that the ultrasonic cat deterrent is probably the best with about a 50% success rate. I don't think you will get much better than that.

Do ultrasonic cat deterrents work?


You will find many other hack deterrent such as coffee grounds. I don't think coffee grounds work very well. There is an ancient cat deterrent which is the plant called Rue. Crushed rue I believe has a reasonable success rate in deterring neighbour's cat coming onto your back yard.

Infographic on herb Rue as a cat repellent


P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Ranking of Emma Raducanu has got worse since winning US Open

Immediately before Emma Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open she was ranked number 150 in the world. Today, she is ranked number 212 in the world. She has to qualify for the French Open because the administrators did not give her a wild card entry. After these years she still has to qualify for a major. No advancement. No progress. No hope as I see it. Disagree? Tell me.

Ranking of Raducanu has got worse over past 3 years
Stomach trouble?! Breathing problems? The beginning of a history of illness and injury. Screenhot.

And therefore I have to conclude that Emma Raducanu has gone backwards since before the 2021 U.S. Open. She has, on the face of it, made no progress whatsoever which is a reality check.

The newspapers continue to write about her but a reality check indicates that she's failed to make progress. Surely we need to look at the hard facts? We have to put aside, now, our expectations for this young woman. It would seem to me that the world has misplaced expectations for her because of her extraordinary success during that U.S. Open tournament three years ago.

Before that tournament we knew nothing about her. There were no real expectations. There were hopes that she might do reasonably well and then she won the tournament; the first qualifier to a tennis tournament to win a major ever in the history of tennis.

And I don't think we can consistently make excuses for this lack of progress. We know that Emma Raducanu has had a series of injuries but it's more than that. It's about her mentality. It's about her attitude and I would argue a lack of commitment to succeeding.

I don't want to sound harsh or be over critical but Emma Raducanu too quickly wants to go back home and doesn't want to stick around long enough and be persistent enough to succeed as a tennis professional.

That is why I said a few months ago that she will retire within 24 months or thereabouts. It's about mentality. I don't actually think she likes tennis any more. She doesn't like all the trappings of the professional tennis life. She prefers to go home and be at home.

This assessment feeds into what she recently said to the news media that she has pushy parents. Have her parents demanded too much of her? Have they pushed her into playing professional tennis as a career when she is not emotionally fit to do it? Just asking.

And I personally believe that some of her illnesses were either semi-psychosomatic or psychosomatic. I think some of them were emotion-based such as the difficulty breathing in her first Wimbledon last-16 match when she had to retire. That I think was a forewarning of what was to come. She was trailing 6-4, 3-0 in this match against Ajla Tomljanovic.

She has retired from matches since when trailing and losing. A lack of steel?

Nobody has discussed this upsetting fact that Emma Raducanu's ranking is now lower than it was just prior to the U.S. Open which he won. This is significant.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Germans keener on cat ownership than the British


On a pro rata basis there are more cats in Germany than the UK. It would appear that the citizens of Germany are keener on cat ownership than the citizens of the UK.

Germany: in 2023 there were 15.7 million cats.

UK: in 2023 there were 11 million cats.

Germany: human population is 83.3 million.

UK: human population is 67.9 million.

The UK population is 0.81 of the German population. Multiplying that figure by 15.7 million cats in Germany produces 12.8 million cats which is 1.8 million higher on a like-for-like basis vis-a-vis the human populations of these countries.

Therefore Germany has more cats per human population than the UK.

Germany: in 42% of households there are 2 or more cats.

UK: 37% of households have more than one cat.

The above figures support the assessment that Germans are keener cat owners than the British.

The above stats come from Pet Food Industry.com and PDSA Pet Populations Report and other sources such as Cats.com and UK Pet Food.org.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

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